The academic year is coming to a close, which means that it’s everyone’s favorite time of year.

Summer break?

Nah.  Grading.

Just kidding.

A colleague once said he teaches for free – they pay him to grade.

Grading is where the joy of teaching goes to die.

This post is about how you might make grading more tolerable and more useful for you and your students by using the AI tool, RPS Coach.

Think of it as your digital TA who actually reads the syllabus, never sleeps, responds promptly, and doesn’t ask for a recommendation letter.

Why Faculty Hate Grading

Let’s face it:  grading is the instructional equivalent of cleaning out the fridge.  You know it’s important, but each new encounter reveals something moldy, unidentifiable, or depressingly familiar.  You rarely find anything that still looks appetizing.

There are many reasons faculty dread this part of the job.

Grading is time-consuming, especially when you want to give thoughtful, individualized feedback – or feel like you should.

It’s mentally exhausting.  By the fifth paper, everything starts sounding eerily like your first.  Or like a message from a bot in a parallel universe.  You wonder if you inhabit the same universe as your students.

It’s emotionally draining.  You feel grumpy and you can’t help but take it out in the grades on the later papers.  You read a student’s exam and realize that, despite your best efforts, this person still seems to believe that “BATNA” means “bad attitude toward negotiation analysis.”  (Of course, you don’t use BATNA anymore, but your students might.)

Worse, the task of distinguishing among variations of mush – slightly better, slightly worse, or just differently squishy – slowly turns your own brain into goo, to use the technical term.  By the end of the process, you’ve forgotten your own name and you start grading your family members with rubrics.

Add to that the potential for bias, especially when papers aren’t anonymous.  Grading becomes not just an academic exercise but a test of your ethical endurance.  Can you truly forget that this is the student who began a paper earlier in the semester with “I didn’t do the reading, but …”?

Meet Your New TA:  RPS Coach

This is where RPS Coach can help – not by replacing your judgment, but by giving you a head start with a fresh set of silicon eyes.

Although I designed Coach to help mediators, attorneys, and parties prepare for negotiation and mediation, it should be surprisingly handy for grading.

How could Coach help you grade?  Let me count the ways.

Start with a first-pass assessment.  It could scan all the papers or exams at once and then provide a consistent, criteria-based analysis.  If you provide a rubric or description of learning goals, Coach could identify how well each student measured up to them.

Stick with your grading standards.  If you supply a grading rubric, Coach could help you apply it more consistently.  This is especially helpful when you’re torn between a B+ and an A- and wondering whether “flawed but ambitious” beats “safe but solid.”

Reduce bias.  If your papers aren’t anonymized, Coach doesn’t care who wrote what.  It won’t grade differently based on a student’s participation in class, sense of humor (or lack thereof), or bold decision to use 14-point Comic Sans.

Spot patterns in student responses.  It could detect trends across the stack – like which concepts students generally grasped (yay!) and which ones didn’t land at all (boo!).  You could use this to inform class-wide feedback and adjust future instruction.

Create feedback summaries.  Coach could generate comments for individual students and also pull together an overall summary for the class.  These could help students spot patterns in their work – and might even cut down on those panicked or indignant office-hour visits that begin, “But I thought I did everything right …”

Of course, Coach shouldn’t replace your role – it enhances it.  You make the final call, but you don’t have to start from scratch.  Using RPS Coach is like using a calculator for long division – a useful tool unless you believe suffering builds character.

As everyone should know by now, you can’t rely on the output of any AI tool.  They all make errors that can sound darn plausible.  So you really need to check their work and make your own grading decisions.

Try It Before Your Brain Turns To Goo

RPS Coach wasn’t built for grading.  But it might just help with the unpleasant task of cleaning out the instructional fridge at the end of the semester.

Of course, you need to give it some structure.  It works best with detailed prompts – like “Evaluate this paper based on these five criteria,” or “Summarize what students got right and wrong in applying negotiation theory.”  Even better, give it the rubric you gave your students.  The more guidance you give, the better the output.

Coach (via ChatGPT) accepts only 10 files per prompt.  You can get around that restriction by putting all the papers in a single zip file.

Grading still won’t be your favorite part of teaching.  But with Coach, it might be just tolerable enough to stop sorting students into “read the assignment” versus “creative reinterpretation.”

Coach could make grading faster, clearer, more consistent, and less mind-numbing.  It might even produce helpful feedback for students (and almost certainly more decipherable – and less bitter – than whatever you would write at 2:00 a.m. in a daze of despair, surrounded by a pile of dried-out pizza crusts).

Take a look.